Click to enlarge.
Photo by: Beth Breitenstein
Lightning always looks cool on tape, especially when shown in slow motion. So, umbrella in hand, I sat outside and waited for that lightining strike to occur, hoping its destination wouldn't be on my head. I held the phone up to record right as a PERFECT strike came. As I pulled my phone down to try to save what I recorded, my RAZR showed a fuzzy screen and said it could not store the footage. Noooooooooooooooooo! Right as the PERFECT storm came, my phone decided it was the PERFECT time to no longer shoot video.
Now, in the real news world, this wouldn't happen. Instead of relying on a 3 inch long Motorola RAZR to shoot something amazing in 15 second intervals, the reporter would have an expensive hi tech, GOOD QUALITY, camcorder.
While my venture in the citizen journalism realm was unsuccesful due to a "technical difficulty", I still do not know how I would have gotten my video off of my cell phone, and onto a computer. According to the Motorola RAZR manual, I hit "copy", and then hook up a "Device" to transfer it. While I consider myself to be somewhat technically saavy, this is unknown territory to me. I can export a video from a DV camera, but not from a cell phone.
What this venture into the citizen journalism world has taught me is that we can't rely on citizen journalists alone. We can't rely on cell phones, and we certainly cannot just hand out dv cameras to everyone to catch the news. Who knows, there may be people out there with great video, but they just don't know how to transfer it to a computer. There also may be citizen journalists out there that missed a key news moment because of a faulty phone.
So, hopefully, lightning will strike for some other citizen journalist out there, but it just isn't gonna happen for me.